case in which on May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously (9–0) that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits the states from denying equal protection of the laws to any person within their jurisdictions. The decision...

Well into the 20th century, state and local courts in most states permitted statements obtained through coerced confessions to be introduced as evidence in criminal cases. In Brown v. Mississippi (1936), however, the Supreme Court for the first time invalidated a state criminal conviction on the grounds that the conviction was based on a coerced confession....

...in 1937 in and around the upper Midwest. Professional basketball assumed major league status with the organization of the new Basketball Association of America (BAA) in 1946 under the guidance of Walter A. Brown, president of the Boston Garden. Brown contended that professional basketball would succeed only if there were sufficient financial support to nurse the league over the early lean......

...found in the United States: L. hesperus, L. curacaviensis, and L. geometricus. The latter is also called the brown widow and is native to Africa. In the northern part of its range, L. mactans is found most often in brush piles and near dwellings, whereas L.......

...bay”) in 1100. Overlooked by Captain James Cook and other early explorers, the harbour with its outlet through the reef of Nuuanu Stream and sheltered by Sand Island was entered by Captain William Brown in 1794. After 1820 Honolulu assumed first importance in the islands and flourished as a base for sandalwood traders and whalers. A Russian group arrived there in 1816, and the port was.....

July 31, 1912Toowoomba, Queens., AustraliaMarch 16, 2008Brisbane, AustraliaAustralian cricketer who was the last pre-World War II Australian Test player and one of the last of the Invincibles of captain Don Bradman’s 1948 touring side that was unbeaten in England. Brown, a right-hand...

American activist, television producer, writer, educator, and filmmaker who hosted Tony Brown’s Journal (1968–2008; original name Black Journal until 1977), the longest-running black news program in television history....

novelist and dramatist whose anonymously published The Power of Sympathy, or the Triumph of Nature Founded in Truth (1789) is considered the first American novel. An epistolary novel about tragic, incestuous love, it followed the sentimental style developed by Samuel Richardson; its popularity began a flood of sentimental novels....

In Robinsonville he came in contact with masters of the Mississippi Delta blues Willie Brown, Charley Patton, and Son House—all of whom influenced his playing and none of whom was particularly impressed by his talent. They were dazzled by his musical ability, however, when he returned to town after spending as much as a year away. That time away is central to Johnson’s mythic status....

The brown-banded cockroach (Supella supellectilium) resembles the German cockroach but is slightly smaller. The male has fully developed wings and is lighter in colour than the female, whose wings are short and nonfunctional. Both sexes have two light-coloured bands across the back. The adult life span is about 200 days, and there may be two generations annually. Eggs may be deposited in......

...larklike; males of both species are much larger than females. The rufous songlark (C. mathewsi), 20 cm (8 inches) long, lives in open forests and has a lively song; the 30-cm (12-inch) brown, or black-breasted, songlark (C. cruralis) lives in open country, utters creaky chuckling notes, and has a flight song, as larks do....

...localities in the Amazon region of South America. Derby’s woolly opossum (Caluromys derbianus) is found in Mexico, in Central America, and along the Pacific slope of Colombia and Ecuador. The brown-eared woolly opossum (Caluromys lanatus) occurs from Colombia and Venezuela to Paraguay. The bare-tailed woolly opossum (Caluromys philander) occurs throughout northern an...

...localities in the Amazon region of South America. Derby’s woolly opossum (Caluromys derbianus) is found in Mexico, in Central America, and along the Pacific slope of Colombia and Ecuador. The brown-eared woolly opossum (Caluromys lanatus) occurs from Colombia and Venezuela to Paraguay. The bare-tailed woolly opossum (Caluromys philander) occurs throughout northern an...

In North America the parasitism of bird nests by brown-headed cowbirds (Molothrus ater) is particularly frequent in ecotones between mature forests and earlier successional patches. Cowbirds lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and are active mainly in early successional patches. Forest birds whose nests are deep within the interior of mature forests are less likely to be attacked......

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, all true spider monkey species are threatened. Most are endangered, and two of these—the brown-headed spider monkey (A. fusciceps), which is found from eastern Panama through northwestern Ecuador, and the variegated, or brown, spider monkey (A. hybridus), which inhabits......

...parasitizing only one or a few closely related host species of insects, a species of tachinid introduced to the United States from Europe (Compsilura concinnata) to control the gypsy moth and brown-tail moth attacks more than 200 species of caterpillars. The means of entering the host has become highly evolved among tachinids. Certain tachinid flies attach eggs to their victim’s.....

About once a week the three-toed sloth of Central and South America (Bradypus variegatus) descends from the trees, where it lives among the branches. For this slow-moving mammal, the journey is a dangerous and laborious undertaking, but it is one of great importance to members of the community among and aboard the sloth. Once the sloth has reached the ground, often some 30 metres (100......

...Philippines have been associated with dramatic population decreases in several species, including the blue-banded kingfisher (A. euryzona), the Sulawesi kingfisher (Ceyx fallax), the brown-winged kingfisher (Pelargopsis amauropterus), and some of the paradise kingfishers (Tanysiptera) of New Guinea....

American politician, who served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1995–96) and of the U.S. Senate (1996–2011) and who pursued the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. In 2011 he became governor of Kansas....

American politician, who served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1995–96) and of the U.S. Senate (1996–2011) and who pursued the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. In 2011 he became governor of Kansas....

British theatrical director and producer who was a major influence on poetic and religious drama and, for more than 25 years, the director chosen by T.S. Eliot for his plays. It was as director of the religious spectacle called The Rock that Browne proposed Eliot as author and helped the poet to make his debut as a dramatist. This led to Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (1935),...

British businessman best known for his role as chief executive officer of British Petroleum (BP) from 1995 to 2007. During his tenure he was recognized for his efforts to make petroleum production a more environmentally conscious industry....

British theatrical director and producer who was a major influence on poetic and religious drama and, for more than 25 years, the director chosen by T.S. Eliot for his plays. It was as director of the religious spectacle called The Rock that Browne proposed Eliot as author and helped the poet to make his debut as a dramatist. This led to Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (1935),...

English poet who owed the immense popularity of her poems to a talent for treating Romantic themes—nature, the picturesque, childhood innocence, travels abroad, liberty, the heroic—with an easy and engaging fluency. Poems (1808), written when she was between 8 and 13, was the first of a series of 24 volumes of verse; from 1816 to 1834 one or more appeared almost every year....

April 17, 1931New York, N.Y.Aug. 27, 2012Hanover, N.H.American photojournalist who captured one of the most shocking images of the Vietnam War on June 11, 1963, when he photographed a Buddhist monk setting himself on fire in a Saigon street as a protest against South Vietnamese Pres. ...

field marshal, one of Austria’s ablest commanders during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) and the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), who nevertheless suffered defeat by Frederick II the Great of Prussia....

Puritan Congregationalist church leader, one of the original proponents of the Separatist, or Free Church, movement among Nonconformists that demanded separation from the Church of England and freedom from state control. His Separatist followers became known as Brownists....

...exile as an escape from monopolies, suppression, and the withdrawal of playing licenses at home. They gave public performances in towns or at rural fairs and private ones in the halls of nobles. Robert Browne’s company was the first, arriving in Frankfurt in 1592. In a country where local theatre was weighed down by excessive moralizing, these actors made an immediate impact through thei...

May 2, 1925 Woodbury, N.J.April 11, 2007Los Angeles, Calif.American character actor who had a regal bearing and a sonorous voice that he used to memorable effect in a string of films; in Broadway plays, notably August Wilson’s Two Trains Running (1992), for which he received ...

British businessman best known for his role as chief executive officer of British Petroleum (BP) from 1995 to 2007. During his tenure he was recognized for his efforts to make petroleum production a more environmentally conscious industry....

American fashion designer known for his reconceptualization of the classic men’s suit. He became widely recognized for his women’s wear after U.S. first lady Michelle Obama wore one of his designs to the 2013 presidential inauguration....

American attorney and politician who served as director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA; 1993–2001) in the administration of Pres. Bill Clinton and as director of the Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy (2009–11) under Pres. Barack Obama....

American attorney and politician who served as director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA; 1993–2001) in the administration of Pres. Bill Clinton and as director of the Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy (2009–11) under Pres. Barack Obama....

Browne began early to compile notebooks of miscellaneous jottings and, using these as a quarry, he compiled his second and larger work, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or, Enquiries into Very many received Tenets, and commonly presumed truths (1646), often known as Browne’s Vulgar Errors. In it he tried to correct many popular beliefs and superstitions. In 1658 he published his third b...

any of various physical phenomena in which some quantity is constantly undergoing small, random fluctuations. It was named for the Scottish botanist Robert Brown, the first to study such fluctuations (1827)....

The most important stochastic process is the Brownian motion or Wiener process. It was first discussed by Louis Bachelier (1900), who was interested in modeling fluctuations in prices in financial markets, and by Albert Einstein (1905), who gave a mathematical model for the irregular motion of colloidal particles first observed by the Scottish botanist Robert Brown in 1827. The first......

any of various physical phenomena in which some quantity is constantly undergoing small, random fluctuations. It was named for the Scottish botanist Robert Brown, the first to study such fluctuations (1827)....

in English and Scottish folklore, a small, industrious fairy or hobgoblin believed to inhabit houses and barns. Rarely seen, he was often heard at night, cleaning and doing housework; he also sometimes mischievously disarranged rooms. He would ride for the midwife, and in Cornwall he caused swarming bees to settle quickly. Cream or bread and milk might be left for him, but other gifts offended hi...

...amateur photographers. The camera was sold with film sealed inside, and the whole unit was mailed back to Rochester for film processing and replacement. In 1900 Eastman introduced the less-expensive Brownie, a simple box camera with a removable film container, so that the whole unit no longer needed to be sent back to the plant....

automatic rifle produced in the United States starting in 1918 and widely used in other countries as a light machine gun. The BAR is a gas-operated rifle invented by John M. Browning (1855–1926), an American gun designer. It has been chambered for various ammunition, but most frequently for .30-06 Springfield. About 47 inches (120 cm) long, it has a 20-round magazine and weighs 19.4 pounds ...

American director who specialized in films of the grotesque and macabre. A cult director because of his association with fabled silent star Lon Chaney and his proclivity for outré fantasy and horror pictures, Browning made a handful of sound pictures as well as almost 40 silent movies. But the impact of those films—especially Dracula...

...activists have worked together to make adoption easier and to improve the quality of day-care centres. According to a much more-contested argument, advanced by the American scholar of religion Don Browning, there are some substantive universal values, such as human rights and the integrity of the global climate, that can provide a foundation for particularistic, communal ones....

...by Canadian Vern Taylor at the 1978 World Championships in Ottawa. Eleven years later, at the world championships in Paris, Midori Ito of Japan became the first woman to complete the jump. Canadian Kurt Browning, the first person to complete a quadruple jump, landed a quad toe loop at the 1988 World Championships in Budapest. Elvis Stojko, also a Canadian, holds two records with respect to the....

major English poet of the Victorian age, noted for his mastery of dramatic monologue and psychological portraiture. His most noted work was The Ring and the Book (1868–69), the story of a Roman murder trial in 12 books....

American director who specialized in films of the grotesque and macabre. A cult director because of his association with fabled silent star Lon Chaney and his proclivity for outré fantasy and horror pictures, Browning made a handful of sound pictures as well as almost 40 silent movies. But the impact of those films—especially Dracula...

...also may penetrate Earth’s atmosphere, but they can be slowed down gently without burning up. Some have been collected by NASA’s U-2 aircraft at very high altitudes. Grains of this kind are known as Brownlee particles and are believed to be of cometary origin. Their composition is chondritic, though they show somewhat more carbon and sulfur than the CI carbonaceous chondrites, and...

It Happened Here was filmed over a period of some seven years by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, who were the movie’s directors, producers, and writers. Both were teenagers when they began working on the movie. Operating on a shoestring budget—the film reportedly cost approximately $20,000—Brownlow and Mollo used mostly amateur actors and were forced ...

American professional baseball team established in 1882 that plays in the National League (NL). Based in St. Louis, Missouri, the Cardinals have won 11 World Series titles and 23 league pennants. Second only to the New York Yankees in World Series championships, St. Louis is the oldest major league team ...

waterfall in Minnehaha Park, Minneapolis, eastern Minnesota, U.S. It is formed by Minnehaha Creek, which flows to the Mississippi River from Lake Minnetonka. The falls have a drop of 53 feet (16 metres) and were known earlier as Little Falls or Brown’s Falls. They were immortalized as the “laughing water” in Henry Wadsworth Longfe...

...Colorado, Utah, and surrounding states and territories. Their chief hideouts were Hole in the Wall, a nearly inaccessible grassy canyon and rocky retreat in north-central Wyoming; Brown’s Hole (now Brown’s Park), a hidden valley of the Green River, near the intersection of the borders of Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah; Robbers’ Roost, a region of nearly impenetrable rugged can...

...to the raccoon-sized Desmarest’s Cuban hutia (Capromys pilorides), with a body 32 to 60 cm long and weight of up to 8.5 kg (19 pounds). The tail ranges from very short and inconspicuous in Brown’s hutia (Geocapromys brownii) to pronounced and prehensile in the long-tailed Cuban hutia Mysateles prehensilis. Depending on the species, the tail may be thinly or th...

...Colorado, Utah, and surrounding states and territories. Their chief hideouts were Hole in the Wall, a nearly inaccessible grassy canyon and rocky retreat in north-central Wyoming; Brown’s Hole (now Brown’s Park), a hidden valley of the Green River, near the intersection of the borders of Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah; Robbers’ Roost, a region of nearly impenetrable rugged can...

city, seat (1852) of Weber county, northern Utah, U.S. It lies at the confluence of the Weber and Ogden rivers, just west of the Wasatch Range and east of the Great Salt Lake. The community began as a settlement developed around Fort Buenaventura, a log stockade with an irrigated garden built in 1845 by Miles M. Goodyear and purchased by the...

city, seat (1848) of Cameron county, extreme southern Texas, U.S. It lies along the Rio Grande opposite Matamoros, Mexico, 22 miles (35 km) from the river’s mouth. With Harlingen and San Benito it forms an industrial, agribusiness, and port complex....

...and Canarsie and Cobble Hill. Although the borough has many private homes, the majority of its people live in apartments, mammoth housing projects, or upgraded row housing. Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville have some of the worst slums in New York, with blocks of burned-out and abandoned buildings. Tensions between African Americans and Hasidic Jews in the biracial area of Crown Heights led......

(1906), racial incident that grew out of tensions between whites in Brownsville, Tex., U.S., and black infantrymen stationed at nearby Fort Brown. About midnight, Aug. 13–14, 1906, rifle shots on a street in Brownsville killed one white man and wounded another. White commanders at Fort Brown believed all the black soldiers were in their barracks at the time of the shooting; but the city...

...has ever since been a matter of controversy, and with the rise of the civil rights movement it became a matter of embarrassment to the army. After the publication in 1970 of John D. Weaver’s The Brownsville Raid, which argued that the discharged soldiers had been innocent, the army conducted a new investigation and, in 1972, reversed the order of 1906. ...

zoological park in Brownsville, Texas, U.S., which has one of the world’s finest reptile collections. Opened in 1971, the 31-acre (12.5-hectare) park is owned by the city and operated by a local zoological society. It was named for one of the daughters of Earl C. Sams, a longtime president of the Penney Company; Gladys Porter, who traveled widely with h...

...of several varieties have yellow or white stripes or bands. The dried heads often are used in decoration. Eulalia also is the botanical name for a genus of perennial grasses that includes browntop (E. fulva), an important forage plant in Australia, Malaysia, and Southeast Asia....

city, Lee and Russell counties, seat (1935) of Russell county, eastern Alabama, U.S., about 25 miles (40 km) southeast of Opelika. The city is a port on the Chattahoochee River, opposite Columbus, Georgia. Incorporated in 1883 as Brownville, it was renamed in 1889 for the old Phoenix Mills in Columbus. In 1923 it was conso...

software that allows a computer user to find and view information on the Internet. The first text-based browser for the World Wide Web became available in 1991; Web use expanded rapidly after the release in 1993 of a browser called Mosaic, which used “point-and-click” graphical manipulations. Such Web browser...

borough (district), administrative and historic county of Hertfordshire, England. The borough is in the southern part of the county, and Cheshunt, its administrative centre, is in the south of the borough....

borough (district), administrative and historic county of Nottinghamshire, England. The borough lies to the west of the city of Nottingham and is bounded on the west by the River Erewash and on the south by the River Trent. Broxtowe comprises four principal towns, each of which has a distinctive character: Beeston...

Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman. He was secretary-general (later president) of the Communist Party (League of Communists) of Yugoslavia (1939–80), supreme commander of the Yugoslav Partisans (1941–45) and the Yugoslav People’s Army (1945–80), and marshal (1943–80), premier (1945–53), and president (1953–80) of Yugoslavia. Tit...

...equivalent of a spoken newspaper as early as 1926. Belgian Radio-Television of the French Community (RTBF), which broadcasts in French, and the Flemish Radio and Television Network (VRT; formerly Belgian Radio and Television [BRTN]), in Flemish, were created as public services. Both are autonomous and are managed by an administrative council. Radio Vlaanderen International (RVI) serves as an......

smallest member of the family Ursidae, found in Southeast Asian forests. The bear (Helarctos, or Ursus, malayanus) is often tamed as a pet when young but becomes bad-tempered and dangerous as an adult. It weighs only 27–65 kg (59–143 pounds) and grows 1–1.2 m (3.3–4 feet) long with a 5-centimetre (2-inch) tail. Its large forepaws bear long,...

...cabarets, entertainers, and artists of this area of Paris fascinated him and led to his first taste of public recognition. He focused his attention on depicting popular entertainers such as Aristide Bruant, Jane Avril, Loie Fuller, May Belfort, May Milton, Valentin le Désossé, Louise Weber (known as La Goulue [“the Glutton”]), and clowns such as Cha-U-Kao and......

Rosenberg replaced Bob Rafelson on the prison exposé Brubaker (1980), which starred Robert Redford as the new warden of a corrupt and abusive prison. He poses as a convict in order to experience the manifold horrors firsthand and later encounters resistance when he tries to implement much-needed reforms. The unrelenting fact-based drama was a critical and......

...Rogers might be a “man out of time,” Captain America is a symbol for all times. Waid’s brief but influential run paved the way for the virtual reinvention of the character in 2005, when Ed Brubaker began his critically acclaimed stint as the writer of Captain America. While not shying away from comic conventions such as time travel, Brubaker...

...in the long struggle between the rival houses of Canmore and Macbeth. It was at Lumphanan that Macbeth fell in 1057. During the Anglo-Norman penetration, great families such as the Balliols, the Bruces, and the Comyns obtained a footing in the shire. When the contested succession between these three houses resulted in the Scottish Wars of Independence, the English king Edward I twice......